“Have a party, Bundle.” Handing her a dollar, Albert vanished into the crowd.
She braved the outhouse first, breathing through her mouth as she peed, afraid of the wasps circling the roof. Back inside the market, she let the crowd wash her around until she fetched up at a pair of creaking bookshelves. The vendor, glad for a break in the tedium, showed Astrid all the kids’ books.
Astrid had been about to purchase a copy of Jack and the Beanstalk when a cover illustration caught her eye—a figure who could have been her mother, wearing the blue uniform of the postal service.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing.
“Postal Mortem. A mystery, sweetums. See the mailman?”
Close up, she could see that the figure was male, but he still looked like Ma: solid, cheery, and blond.
“‘Everett Burke, the hyperobservant mailman,’” the woman read. “‘Delivering justice with a smile.’”
“My mom’s name is Ev,” Astrid said, handing Jack and the Beanstalk back. “She delivers mail, too.”
When Dad finally reappeared, clutching a white umbrella in his thin hand, she showed him her find. “You think Ma will like it?”
His smile was forced. “Course she will, Bundle.”
Astrid’s spirits dropped. She was silent on the long drive back, and when they got home, she buried the paperback between her mattress and box spring. At night she could feel it beneath her, and it left her anxious and troubled.
It was the first time she had considered her mother’s tastes, had wondered about the preferences of another human being. The realization, partial though it was, was terrifying: Ma had likes and dislikes, was mistress of an interior world her daughter might never know.
After a week, she threw the book away.
A couple of summers later, Astrid looked up from the vegetable garden to see her mother settling on the porch with a brand-new Everett Burke hardcover in hand.
“I didn’t know you liked those,” she said sharply.
“They’re my favorite,” Ev said, already absorbed in the prologue.
Astrid shot her father an accusing glance through the wall of young corn stalks. He stood, dusting his hands, and meandered over to where she was weeding.
“I didn’t want her to know we’d been junking,” he whispered.
That had been another first: the keen pang of disappointment in him that Astrid felt as he walked away.
The memories played through her mind as she raced around the house, a fleeting recollection of childhood betrayal that gave way to more immediate worries. When Dad died, Ma had started acting as if she were the hyperobservant mailman from the Burke books—and pretending Astrid was Petey, Everett’s crime-solving sidekick.
Had Astrid’s moving out made her worse? It had been Ma’s idea that she go, but if Ev had now decided that Sahara was Cindilou Mortone, or that Jacks was Petey’s nemesis, Motormouth Cain…
But it wasn’t Ma pounding on the front door.
That didn’t make it good news. Jacks’s father was on the porch, hammering hard enough to break the door down.
Lee Glade was brawny and blond, with a look of permanent sunburn and dust-brown eyes. Chief Lee, everyone called him—he had run the Fire Department for twenty-five years, since his own father had retired from the post. The Lee men had been fire chiefs for five generations. Before that, the town was barely settled, still Indian land in fact as well as on paper.
He had the biggest hands Astrid had ever seen, hands like pizza tins—red and wide, with the flat fingers he had passed on to his son.
“Hey, Astie,” he said. “My boy here?”
“Sorry. You just missed him.”
“When’ll he be back?”
“He didn’t say.”
“You’re sure he’s not around?”
She put her hands on her hips and glared, but the brightness of the sun kept her from winning the staring contest. “You want to search the place, Chief?”
“No need.” He beamed, happy he’d scored a point. “Tell him to call.”
“Okay,” she said, blinking sunspots out of her eyes. As he turned to go, the gate squeaked again.
This time it was Ma.
Ev was dressed in Everett Burke’s civvies—shirt, slacks, homburg, and a bow tie. Her breasts hung loose under the shirt, pushed sideways, just slightly, by the blue suspenders that held her pants up. In recent years the hair on her cheeks and chin had begun coming in coarse. Ev plucked the offending follicles every evening, but this morning they were untouched, forming a stringy beard. She held a quart jar of fat homemade gherkins.
“Lee,” she said. “How’re the boys making out here?”
“Boys? Oh, Jacks and…” He smirked at Astrid. “The young fellas are just terrific, Ev. How you keeping?”
“Thanking God every day the politicians don’t control the weather.”
“Uh, yeah.” He gave Astrid a broad wink, amusement and mock sympathy mixing in his expression, making her wish she could nail him between the eyes with a rock. “Tell Jacks I was here, will you—Sonny?”
“Sure. He’ll be thrilled to hear you stopped by.”
Point for her. Lee’s mouth tightened, and he stomped away.
Ev held the gate as he bulldozed past, then strode into handshake range and stuck out a mitt. “Petey.”
Astrid shook. “Hey, Pop.” The word—a compromise they had reached with some pain—didn’t stick in Astrid’s throat the way it did when she had tried to humor Ev with “Dad.”
“Chief bring you a housewarming gift?”
“Just the everlasting joy of his company.”
Ev hefted the pickle jar. “I brought you something from the farmer’s market. Hope Sahara still likes ’em.”
Sahara. Not Cindilou. Ma’s fantasy world was holding at a population of two. “They’re her favorite,” she said, hoping it was true. Her stomach rumbled—she was ravenous again. “What do you think of the house?”
“Doesn’t look any different.”
“Even in daylight?” The executor of Dad’s will had brought them to view the place twice, both times at night.
“Seen it by day, too. My route used to take me here.” Ma hitched her suspenders. “Well…exterior’s nice enough. Paint job’s sloppy.”
Astrid nodded. The house had been painted the cobalt blue that some townspeople claimed as the signature Indigo Springs color. Whoever had done the job had painted over the bricks of the chimney. It was blue up to the eaves, with just a stub of red brick jutting up above the roof.
“Albert never could lay paint.”
“It’s quirky, Pop, but it looks okay.”
“How’s the plumbing?”
“Good plumbing, good wiring, good—”
“Doesn’t look like he did anything with the garden.”
“I don’t know if he was here much,” Astrid said. “He was living with Olive, remember?”
“The second wife,” Ma said distantly, as if she had not been the first. “No garden…interesting. Indicative of his state of mind, maybe.”
“State of—?” A fist closed around Astrid’s stomach.
“At the time of his murder.”
Astrid swallowed. “Daddy wasn’t…his liver failed.”
“Albert wasn’t a drinking man. He didn’t have hepatitis, no family history of liver disease—”
“That doesn’t mean he was killed!”
“Cirrhosis is slow, Petey, and he’d had a physical prior to his death. The second wife had him applying for jobs as a truck driver.”
“How do you learn these things?”
Ma hooked her thumbs into her pants, rocking back on her heels.
Astrid lowered her voice. “The real Everett Burke would never read somebody else’s mail.”
“Desperate times, Petey,” Ma said serenely. “You gonna show me around the place?”
“You said it hadn’t changed.”
“House is always different when it’s occupied.” Ev troope
d up the front stairs, noting Lee’s dusty footprints before stepping indoors. “Something wrong, son?”
“No.” Astrid followed reluctantly. What if there were more chantments—the rake had to be one—lying out in plain sight?
The living room was empty but for a painting Jacks had left leaning against the wall; they’d been looking for something that might match with a plush rose carpet and an eyesore of a fireplace. Like the exterior of the house, the hearth and mantel of the fireplace were painted blue.
“Now that is odd,” Ma said, and Astrid was forced to nod, like a good sidekick. “Kind of empty in here, isn’t it?”
Astrid scowled. Ev had been pushing her to move into this place of Albert’s for months, and had offered to give her an old couch and chair that had been sitting in her basement. But the day Astrid agreed to move, Ev called the local Goodwill store and gave them the furniture instead.
The only thing in the room besides the paintings was the aspen urn containing Dad’s ashes, a tall cylinder with copper inlay that had ended up on the mantel.
She decided to ignore the jab. “So, Pop, is it nice having the house to yourself?”
“I’m keeping up.” Plucking up the urn, Ma weighed it against the jar of pickles. “Looks comfortable, son. More room than you had at home. You’ll be happier.”
“I wasn’t unhappy, Ma…Pop.”
“Nicer than the apartment where you shacked up with that basketball player, Jennifer, Jessica…”
“Jemmy. Jemmy Burlein.”
“Right, Jemmy.” Ev cracked open the door leading to the basement, listening.
“Pop?”
“Coast’s clear, Petey. Let’s snoop around a bit.”
A protest came to Astrid’s lips…and then died. She followed Ev into the laundry room.
Where Victorian order held sway above, chaos nested belowstairs. The basement was a warren of narrow rooms, some the size of cubicles, all arranged in a puzzlework that barely came out square. At the hallway’s end, Jacks’s studio jutted up six inches above floor level. Its corner walls were covered in windows that began at Astrid’s hip and rose to the ceiling. The room might have been an enclosed porch, if only it had a door leading outside. Instead, it extended oddly into the yard like the bridge of a small ship. Paints and brushes were spread over a small table in one corner. On the easel, a portrait of Lee Glade glowered out from a background of dense black smoke.
Ma clucked. “Not much to guess about the state of that boy’s mind.”
“Jacks and Lee have been having a tough time.”
“Chief’s remarkably high-strung for a man of action, but he means well.”
“He pretends to, anyway.”
Ma shot her a sidelong glance. “It’s not like you to be nasty, Petey. Any idea why Jackson quit the Fire Department?”
She wasn’t going to open that can of worms. “No.”
Ma moved on to the bedrooms, tapping on the walls, squinting at the breaks in the layers of floral wallpaper. “Your father kept scrapbooks of news clippings, son—hard-luck stories. Man loses son in car wreck. Woman with amnesia found in Tucson. He got papers from everywhere, remember? Collected phone books. And he mailed packages, lots of packages.”
“You’re looking into Dad’s…peculiarities?”
“Don’t you wonder, Petey? Five years of marriage and then one day, all at once, he came over strange.”
She shrugged. “It must have been before I was born.”
“Know why he drove to Wallowa every month?”
“To hit the flea markets.”
“To ship out his mail. He was afraid I’d learn what he was up to.”
Astrid licked her lips. Dad had done crazy things to feed his junking habit: shoplifting, cheating at cards. He had gone to prison for fraud once—he’d pretended to be renting out an apartment, so he could collect damage deposits from ten sets of unwitting would-be tenants.
He was trying to buy an old tureen, he told her later.
Hiding his outgoing mail from Ev. Had Albert been delivering drugs?
No. Drug dealers made money. Besides, Dad had magic on his side. “He bought junk in Wallowa.”
“Now we’ve finally got you inside this place, Petey, we can discover what happened to its former owner.”
“That’s why you wanted me to move? Pop, I am not helping you solve some non ex is tent mystery. I’m going to meet someone, settle down, maybe have you a grandkid….”
Ma crossed her arms over her chest, glowering.
“I’m going to have a life. I’m going to call the friends I stopped seeing when I dropped out of school—”
“Right. All of a sudden you’re a different person.”
Stung, Astrid sucked her lips between her teeth. Sahara was here. Things would change.
“You can’t run away from Albert’s murder, Petey.”
“There was no murder! Albert got sick. Ma, this charade of yours has got to stop.”
Ma’s voice chilled. “It’s no charade, son.”
“You stopped caring what Albert did when you divorced him. He was your ex, and in case you’ve forgotten, Everett Burke isn’t gay.”
“Petey…”
“Ma, if you’re my father, and Albert was my father too, how do you think—?”
The jar of pickles hurtled across the room and shattered, striking the wall an inch from Astrid’s ear. Pickles hit the floor with splashy thuds. Bits of glass rebounded from the plaster, pricking her neck.
Astrid froze. Vinegar fumes burned her nostrils.
“You want your head rattled, boy?” Ev snarled.
Shaking, Astrid knelt to pick up the brine-doused shards of glass.
• Chapter Six •
The real Everett Burke would never scare his kid senseless. Astrid swayed, tempted by an urge to sit down where she was, and never get up. Why not? Dad was compulsive and now Ma’s not only delusional but violent. Catatonia could round out the freak show nicely.
The glass fragments on the floor shone slickly. Vinegar ran down the wall, spreading from the baseboard. A blue tint—paint? dye?—bled narrow streaks into the puddle. Astrid’s stomach—by now she was so hungry, she was verging on nausea—flipped.
Ma was pacing. “It was murder, Petey, it was killing, he was killed-poisoned-stabbed…”
Leave the cleanup. Astrid tried to stiffen her nerveless knees.
“…shot-banged up, he was banged up, baby. Big-bang, smallbang, bangbang!”
“You have to listen.” Her voice shook; she was barely intelligible. “Ma…”
Then Sahara skipped into the room.
She was radiant. No, more than radiant—she was blinding. She had put on a sundress and sandals, too little clothing for the cool spring weather. Her breasts strained against the fabric, and her dark eyes sparkled. Her lips were orange, like mangoes.
The lipstick. Astrid put out a hand to steady herself and nearly drove pickle jar shards into her palm. With an effort she focused on Ma, shifting Sahara into her peripheral vision. It seemed to help.
“There you are, young lady.” Red-faced but suddenly calm, Ev tipped her hat. “Welcome home.”
Sahara dropped a curtsy. “I was going to explore the attic, Ev.” As she said Ev’s name, her voice deepened, filling the air with mystery vibrations. “Care to join me?”
“There’s an attic?”
She’s wearing the mermaid pendant, Astrid thought dizzily.
“You bet there is.”
“What are we waiting for?” Ma said.
“Come on, then.” Sahara whirled out of the room. Ma trotted after, leaving Astrid to bring up the rear, her hands full of pickle wreckage and reeking of vinegar.
The kitchen’s chaotic jumble of unpacked boxes was gone, probably—knowing Sahara—shoved into the pantry. Cups and spoons were set out on the table along with an open sack of sugar. The kettle murmured on the stove.
Sahara nudged Astrid toward the sink. “Let’s get rid of these.” She pried t
he glass shards out of her grip. “Ev, you take milk in your tea, don’t you? I don’t think Jacks bought any.”
“Boy’s a vegan,” Ev grumbled.
“Sorry about that.”
“I drink it black anyway.”
“Since when?” She set the tea to steeping, then produced a flashlight and a short stepladder from the back porch. “Okay, we’ve got a few minutes. After you, Ev.” Ma led the way upstairs, shoving the ladder up through the attic trapdoor and climbing it energetically.
“What if there are chantments up there?” Astrid hissed in Sahara’s ear.
“She won’t know what they are.”
“Sahara—”
“Astrid, trust me,” Sahara said, and she felt herself giving way. It was impossible to say no to this glowing, glamorous apparition.
“You two coming up?” Ev called.
“Right behind you.” Skirt swaying, Sahara followed. Astrid climbed up last, steadying herself by laying a hand on the attic floor…
…and suddenly she was overcome with a mixed sense of nostalgia and dread.
Albert brought her up here once. It had been winter, and…
She jerked free and it stopped.
Touch, she realized. The flashes come when I touch…what? Things Albert owned?
The attic was a single room with a low-slanted roof, with dormer windows in front and back through which shone weak, grit-filtered sunlight. Ev, taking out a handkerchief, spat on the cotton and began scrubbing at the glass. Sahara shone the flashlight to and fro, swiping at cobwebs. Astrid just watched from halfway up the ladder.
“Not much in here,” Ev grunted, kicking at a roll of old carpet. A stack of metal pails leaned against the wall next to some blue-splashed paint trays and one weathered brush.
She’s calming down, Sahara mouthed. Then, bending to pick a small hunk of glass out of Astrid’s hair, she raised her voice again: “How’s work been, Ev?”
“Fine, young lady. Neither rain nor sleet, you know.”
From screaming and throwing things to small talk, Astrid thought. What am I going to do?
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